1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to cooking medium systems having control-assisted filtering and draining.
2. Description of Related Art
Known fryers, e.g., open-well fryers and pressure fryers, are used to cook various food products, e.g., poultry, fish, potato products, and the like. Such fryers may include one or more cooking vessels, e.g., fryer pots, which may be filled with a cooking medium, e.g., an oil, a liquid shortening, or a meltable-solid shortening. Such fryers also include a heating element, e.g., an electrical heating element, such as a heating oil medium, or a gas heating element, such as a gas burner and gas conveying tubes, which heat the cooking medium in the cooking vessel. The amount of time sufficient to cook or to complete the cooking of the food product at a given cooking temperature depends on the type of food product which is cooked. Moreover, the cooking medium may be used during several cooking cycles before the cooking medium inside the cooking vessel is filtered, replaced, or supplemented with a new or filtered supply of cooking medium.
This process may require a plurality of tanks, each containing a cooking medium, and each tank having its own regulation system. Cooking medium may be filtered periodically to maintain cooking quality and to prolong the operational lifetime of the cooking medium. The filtering process removes cooking by-product, e.g., suspended food particles, ranging from dust-sized particles to larger pieces of crackling and small pieces of food product. A known filtering process requires the manual opening and closing of multiple valves at different time intervals for emptying, washing, filtering, and refilling of the frypot. In known systems, there may be multiple steps required to perform the filtering operations.
Moreover, known fryer apparatuses may have multiple frypots for cooking various types of foods. In a system with multiple frypots, each frypot may be designated for cooking a different food product, e.g., chicken, “french-fried potatoes,” and fish. The flavor characteristics of each of these food products may become infused to a greater or a lesser degree in the cooking medium. Each of these cooking vessels may use a single drain container, e.g., a container in which cooking medium is stored while being filtered. Nevertheless, these known systems may require a large amount of space, because each frypot may require its own drain container.
In order to solve these problems, a known system may use fewer drain containers than frypots. Nevertheless, such systems may result in multiple frypots being filtered at the same time, thereby mixing cooking medium from frypots designated for different food products during filtering and replacement. This same-time filtering may adversely affect food quality, e.g., cooking chicken in a significant quantity of fish-flavored cooking medium may result in, e.g., “fish-flavored” chicken. Moreover, if the drain container is not made to be sufficiently large to handle the cooking medium from multiple frypots, then filtering more than one frypot at the same time may lead to overflow of cooking medium in the drain container, thereby wasting the cooking medium and decreasing the efficiency of the system. As demand for healthier food increases, food suppliers have begun to replace less expensive cooking media with more expensive, healthier cooking media. One such change is the recent demand for cooking media with zero trans fats. This specific type of cooking medium is more expensive than other known cooking media, and it thereby may be inefficient to waste cooking medium.